National Dictionary Day 16 October: How Many Words Are in a Dictionary?

The sixteenth of October marks National Dictionary Day. Why this date? Because it’s the publication day of Noah webster’s foundational 1828 An American Dictionary of the English Language, which helped codify US spelling, e.g. color vs. colour. And of course, good dictionaries are something we should all celebrate since they are the repositories of accumulated wisdom and have a story to tell us.

The counting game

Coming down to earth a little, I’d suggest it’s also quite interesting to look at what exactly is contained in any given dictionary. The first unit for counting is what’s known as a headword, that is, the word that you would actually look up. So words like bed, house, buy, sell, take, condiment and so forth are headwords. Counting headwords makes it possible to compare different dictionaries.

For instance, the original webster’s Dictionary of 1828 had about 70,000 headwords. But many words in common use have several meanings which a dictionary shows, and therefore counting meanings is yet another way of comparing them. And then, finally, headwords will themselves contain phrases or idioms of various kinds, which will increase the count. For instance, the New World College Dictionary lists nine idioms under dog, such as ‘a dog’s age’, ‘a dog’s life’, ‘a dog in the manger’, and so forth.

The current Unabridged Merriam-Webster Dictionary contains 502,000 headwords and over 700,000 definitions.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) contains over half a million headwords, but several thousand of them, though, are archaic or obsolete. Collins Unabridged Dictionary claims 732,000+ words, meanings, and phrases (which includes 9,500 place names and 7,300 biographies).

The ‘first’ English dictionary

Contrast those numbers with the first English dictionary, in the sense of an alphabetical wordlist, which is Robert Cawdrey’s A Table Alphabeticall. But at a modest 2,543 words it’s worlds apart from any modern dictionary. The reason for the brevity of the headword list is very simple: this dictionary’s aim was to translate into everyday language the many loanwords – ‘hard words’ – which had come into English from other languages, particularly in the preceding century . In other words, its intent was entirely pedagogical, as its lengthy title shows:

A
Table Alphabeticall
conteyning and teaching the true
vvriting, and underſtanding of hard
uſuall English wordes, borrowed from
the Hebrew, Greeke, Latin,
or French. &c.
With the interpretation thereof by
plaine Engliſh words, gathered for the benefit
& helpe of Ladies, Gentlewomen, or any other
vnskilfvll perſons.

Whereby they may the more eaſilie
and better vnderſtand many hard Engliſh
wordes , vvhich they ſhall heare or read in
Scriptures, Sermons, or elſwhere, and alſo
be made able to vſe the ſame aptly
themſelues.

The first entries are abandon, abash, abba, abbesse, abettors, aberration, abbreviate, abbridge, all defined by more familiar terms. Thus:

Abandon, caſt away, or yeelde vp, to leaue, or forſake.

abaſh, bluſh.
abba, father.

[…]

aberration, a going, a ſtray, or wandering.

Nowadays, fortunately, dictionaries are more comprehensive, less patriarchal.

The word dictionary first appeared in print in the title of an English book in Sir Thomas Elyot’s Latin-English wordbook, The Dictionary of Syr Thomas Eliot Knyght, published in 1538. In basing the word on Latin, English is in line with the Romance languages but differs starkly from the Germanic languages, and several other languages, as we shall see in the next post.

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Image courtesy of Romain Vignes on Unsplash.